Sub advice sought

Mountjoy Mugger

It's great to have this Forum up and running!

I've got, as stated in another thread, a Marantz SR4200 receiver, Marantz 4100ose DVD with a few old JBL speakers that were originally part of a JBL Home Cinema kit - the sub was passive and there's no way to hook it up to the receiver as far as I can figure it out.

My living room measures around 9 x 14 feet. I was looking at getting an active sub for the kit to get the bass rolling in my DVD collection. Any suggestions?

daveg

You can hook up the passive sub the same way you connected up the front speakers. For a active sub have a look at richersounds.

Kali

aye you can either route the front speakers through the sub, or simply connect both the sub and the speakers directly to the reciever, its all the same thing really, depending on the quality of your fronts.. in your case the former would be the ideal option (try to take as much bass out of those jbls as possible, they cant handle it)..

for a active sub, look to spend around at least €250 for something decent (again depending on your current setup and the freq range and quality of your existing speakers for handling lowend bass)... that said the cheapest active richersounds have looks pretty cool (not too good spec wise tho)

(edit: stupid mistake)

Mountjoy Mugger

Originally posted by Kali
aye you can either route the front speakers through the sub, or simply connect both the sub and the speakers directly to the reciever

That's where my problems are, Kali. I can't hook up the speakers to my current sub. They must feed into the receiver. The outlet for the sub on the receiver doesn't seem to match any connectors on the sub either. As I said, the sub was part of a cheapish JBL Home Cinema System.

This is making me wonder; I feel an active sub may be better in the circumstances. If this is the case, any recommendations given the size of the room?

_CreeD_

You're better off running an active sub separately from an AV pre/Amp. Many surround channels will use it when there wouldnt normally be any sizable low-end on the main speakers (eg. fronts are meant to be silent, but you're still supposed to hear an ominous rumble). If you have it connected to the front speakers you'll improve their bass handling but lose the discrete aspect of the sub channel.

I dunno too much about subs (quality wise) to be honest, but I had a quick look around for my brother's upgrade a while ago and the Paradigm Pr10 (at Richersounds) look pretty good for the money (Stay away from the Mission in the same price range (70 ase), it has a few nasty quirks apparently)

just having a look at a pic of the receiver back plate. There's no speaker-output for the sub but you could hook it into the same terminals as your front speakers as Originally suggested. But you mentioned the sub having connectors/plugs and not bare wires? It's up to you but you could probably get away with splicing the connectors off if the wire seems to be just 2 core and hooking them in.....
Still I'd go with getting an active Sub, they're a lot handier/better than passive.